Democracy is done a huge favor when people are allowed to make their own decisions and understand all the information. So when you have access to a broad and complete video archive of the things being said, both by Congress or in the news, by politicians on the news, you know the more information and the more context that's available, the better people are equipped to make those decisions for themselves and to understand what the issues are.
It's also a great tool to find out what the news is not talking about. What doesn't make it to primetime, what doesn't make it to the cable news stations.
With the television archive project you can take information from political speech and cross-reference it with other information from political speech and you don't have to be a network news producer to do it, you can do it in your own home and do it comprehensively.
Not only is the TV Archive something that is useful on its own and is good as a research service, it's a building block for something much bigger, it's a building block for applications of the internet and applications of news video we actually can't anticipate today, we don't know what these innovations will end up doing for the whole internet, but we know they're gonna be good and we know that they're like a first step towards something better.
When I'm watching CSPAN or when I'm watching FOX, I wanna see what kind of people they have as guests and what kind of people they have on as experts and on the right side, kind of in a contextual box, I want to see from Sunlight Labs using their data, who the biggest campaign contributors are, how much money are you taking from who. I wanna see what positions they're taking, I wanna take metadata from across the web and compare it to this visual record and I think that's gonna also reveal really interesting things